neither Russian nor Kazakh are in my language retinue... makes me hope that Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine (Romaninan/moldovan are the same, similar to Portuguese, which I used to speak, except post 1946, Moldova writes in Cyrillic) will have something going. I know one word in Ukrainian, 'freedom.' I don't know any Magyar, but it's a finno-ugrian language, or Ugrian under the new classifications... different, but not impossible, because over the years it has been simplified to present and past tenses... (still make a future tense or a subjunctive tense, but it's by adding will or would).

be in an academic setting to challenge that one right now. Spanish and the Central and South Americans provide AMPLE examples counterindicating that silliness. And Spanish certainly has a future tense!

Well, it's a cheap shot at Yale, admittedly, but macro level behavioral economics? I'm in the wrong field. All you have to do is use pithy House quotes, such as, "Everybody lies," and "everybody's an idiot."

I'll find this somewhere and read his study... but on the surface, it looks like cold fusion all over again.

I just love it when economists attempt to use their voodoo to predict behavior...

If it sounds like I am not a particular fan of the Dismal Science, I'm not. Between Austrian Economics, and then the Wall Street Crew we've seen with their protection rackets in DC and elsewhere, with derivatives and the like... oh, I'll just be quiet and tell the kids to get off of my yard.

Well we know that U of Chicago economists are out of their damned minds, and we know that Harvard economists are out of their damned minds.....why would Yale economists be any damned different :)?

Speaking of wedding economics with sociology and writing big books about the author's genius, that T. Friedman puke was on Maher on Friday. God my hands itch to wring neck. He is so smug too, I think I would spit on him if I could, throw a shoe or two, show him my a$$....something. Anyhow, Mr. Friedman Unit was talking about how he hopes that Iraq does something with itself successful so all of those people didn't die for nothing.....and I once again totally lost it. Makes me clean a lot though.

that's the time when you have to say to yourself, as Jim Carey did in Ace Ventura "I am a being of light..earthly matters are of no importance to me.." :)

I know what you mean though, Friedman is smugness squared. Maybe marrying a hundred million, or whatever it was, does that to you. That, and pimping yourself out for 50k a pop speaking engagements (paid by people who aren't expecting anyone to seriously question the status quo.)

Still, must have been a bit of a challenge, given that many of the phonemes are different. I have some Romanian friends, and I've always thought that Romanian sounded sort of like Italian as spoken by someone with a Slavic accent.

Give me some poker tournament tips when you feel up to it. Booked my Jacksonville trip and had to pay for it before these f'ers at ClubWPT have even gotten in touch with me. Lemme tell you, for a service that is legal and charges "members" a monthly fee, they don't do any better at customer service than FT did, in fact, all things considered, they're worse. It makes less than no sense. I won the biggest prize they give out and they can't even call me in a timely fashion, as if my travel costs don't go up by the day if I don't book. Been emailing and "live chatting" with service reps in, I'm guessing from their names, India or some other foreign outsourced outpost. What else is new?

Otherwise, I don't know your style, and if I suggest something other than 'foldy mcfoldfold...that A-10 off looks good until it doesn't, i dunno.

I'd say either be an arrogant a$$ at the table, tony G type, or a sphinx. I'd go with the first, because you can always shut up, but getting started with smack and irritation and distraction later is more difficult. It's a nasty road, but gets under folks' skin. Keep telling them how lucky they are, how they have no skillz, etc...

I'm taking all I can get, and you're much more experienced than me. I'm a natural talker, a complete multiple-personality when I have to be (the one "plus" of going from welfare and foodstamps in the ghetto at 5 to upper middle class and private school by 15, and every step in between, having had to pretend to be a lot of things to a lot of different people). As for A10os, not a problem with me, I tend to get too patient if anything.

are known for modifying our shotgun shells... rock salt, a condom full of water (I usually put that one with a magnum round), etc... if I pop a cap in your a$$ with rock salt, that's not just gonna put you down, but it will hurt for DAYS. The water condom will simply knock your a$$ to the ground. For quite a few minutes. And it only uses a tablespoon of water, so it's a green nonlethal shell, too.

I think it comes somewhere after the politics/religion conversation where you let them know you will never convert and your next date should be at an occupy rally. At that point "oh by the way, I have a blogging addiction" might have some context.

It's hard though, I've gotten through the occupy date and still haven't found a way to bring up TL.

Don't worry about the facial hair, some of us with eastern european ancesters had to start it a lot sooner than 53.... My poor sister had stiches on her chin when she was 13 and that thing has been sprouting like weeds ever since.

southern European ancestors also started way early, and it gets worse and worse over time. Although, I must say, as I get older, I find that the hair growth on my legs (which, trust me, used to be formidable, and kept a number of ladies' shaver manufacturers in business for many years) has gotten sparser. Unfortunately, much of it seems to have migrated to my chin and upper lip. :-(

In particular, the degree of self-serving intellectual dishonesty, outright dishonesty, and self-delusion on the part of the mercenary academician/consultants ensconced in positions of power in our most respected business and economics schools these days was-is staggering.

A lot of us have come to expect that kind of thing from the posturing floozies running for office that we're forced to choose between, but why (theoretically) venerable universities like Harvard see fit, for thirty pieces of silver, to employ people to teach who would set Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas spinning in their graves at 2000 rpms is slightly demoralizing to say the least.

a decent job of providing financial aid above and beyond, because they can. If you are at Harvard and not receiving financial aid it's because you don't need it. And they've eliminated loans from the equation so it's all in grants.

If they want you they will get you there regardless of your ability to pay.

If you make less than $65,000 it's completely free and if you make up to $150,000 a year it is only 10% of your income. That makes it cheaper than most state schools for most people. Harvard has its problems, but crippling students with debt isn't one of them.

has a both sex-blind and finance-blind applications process. They don't even glance at any financial stuff until they've decided who to admit. Then they provide whatever financial assistance the prospective student needs.

As CST says, they don't do loans. And unlike many, many schools, nobody is turned away because they can't pay.

If anybody at Harvard has "crippling student loan debt," it's solely because their very well-to-do parents, ineligible for financial aid, for some reason decided to make the kid pay for his/her own education. I very much doubt there are very many of those.

included, admitted that because of the hit their endowments have taken during the Great Recession, they are now more likely to give a spot to a student who does not require any financial aid rather than admit a student who needs assistance.

If they do accept a student who needs financial aid, the school provides it. They just admit fewer of those students now. So, the process these days is not so much blind as, maybe, slightly near-sighted.

I would like to see a link for that because it goes totally against the way Harvard has operated for at least 40 years.

And yes, their endowment did take a huge hit, I believe not just in the crash but not long prior to that, I have a vague memory of some of their investment managers being accused of gross incompetence for losing a lot of money.

The poster may be referring to their treatment of legacies, and looking at where people live. So maybe they aren't looking at $$ specifically but you can still infer based on other data.

That being said, they recently expanded their financial aid program - citing the recession as one of the reasons (specifically raising the "free tuition" cap from 60,000 to 65,000). So it doesn't make sense to me for them to do that, but then exclude lower income students. If they are worried about endowment, they could have kept their earlier policy in place.

Finally, I agree with everything you've said about Harvard. Sure there are a lot of @ssholes who went there but they aren't the only people just the loudest. Cripes I mean they're currently employing Elizabeth Warren.

My brother would've been accepted to any college in the world, but he applied to only two: M.I.T. & Harvard, with M.I.T. as his 1'st choice. I'll never forget the letter he received from Harvard shortly after he applied:

(paraphrasing, but pretty close)

Dear xxx applicant,
Thank you for your application, but we couldn't help but notice that the other university (didn't refer to it by name) you applied to was your first choice. Therefore, we will keep your application in abeyance until you receive notification from your 1'st choice, and should you still wish to consider Harvard, please notify us for further consideration.

They didn't write it, but you could feel the word, Harrumph! oozing off the page.

The story doesn't end there:

My brother attended M.I.T. for two years, but after his sophomore year, and after having attained the highest scholastic score at the University, he became bored with M.I.T's social scene, and decided to apply/transfer to Harvard to finish his undergraduate studies.

With my brother's record, Harvard, of course had to take him but, not forgetting the sleight two years earlier of being second (gasp!) choice, they informed him that, try as hard as they might, they simply couldn't find an upper class room available for him. Therefore, "we hope it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience for you to live in a Freshman dorm for your Junior year."

It's not even close to being unique to Harvard. In fact, it was for a long time other colleges have been doing it to applicants who apply to Harvard. When they figured they'd get in to Harvard, they put them on the wait list because they didn't (harrumph) like the idea of being a "safety school."

And you're bothered, I guess, by the idea that current students should get housing preference at the non-freshman dorms over transfers. I don't really know what to say about that. There's almost always a housing crunch at urban colleges and many times there aren't enough spaces for even all the freshmen accepted and some whose families don't live too far away are told they have to live at home until a room opens up.

some of your comments, but it's really not that important. However, it would be interesting to learn the basis of your statements as they don't quite comport with my experience.

For instance, Harvard receives about 35,000 applications yearly, and has only about 2000 openings. Many applicants toss in Harvard, as a fluke, their chances for admission are extremely slim.

But, I don't know where you got the silly notion that I'm "bothered" by something. Insofar as my brother went on to some great things, and attained great wealth in the process, I was just having a light-hearted stroll down memory lane.

The grad schools are semi-independent, so each one probably does it a bit differently and I have no clue what those policies are. I'm sure they're nowhere near as generous as undergrad, but Harvard as a whole has for a long time had a pretty strenuous commitment to not turning away good students on any level because of lack of ability to pay.

are all different at Harvard. Both Mr. Zorba and Zorba Daughter got their Ph.D.'s from Harvard, and they both got paid to do so, with no tuition to pay themselves. Both had research fellowships. Their money came from the research grants of their advisers (and some from other grants that they applied for, and were granted). Mr. Z. also got some money from a teaching fellowship. Research fellowships and teaching fellowships are not uncommon in many, if not most, graduate schools. They were both in the sciences, though, where grant money is easier to come by (make that "was easier"- not as much so today) than in some departments. I don't know what graduate students in the Humanities, for example, do for money. OTOH, many universities do grant teaching fellowships to grad students, to have them help teach undergraduate courses, run the labs, run study groups, grade papers, and so on. Grad students are a whole he!! of a lot cheaper than faculty.

the ec dept at Harvard has always had more than its share of right-wing loonies. To some extent, it's self-perpetuating because the current dept. faculty gets to choose new hires. If I were Harvard pres., I'd step in and assert my authority to make some changes, but Harvard presidents almost never are willing to contradict dept. decisions on these things.

although they aren't bad at educating people to make money who then in turn give it back to Harvard.

11 figures is rediculous but if you consider how long they've had to invest money it makes sense. They've been holding serious cash for a lot longer than most banks.

A big pet peeve for me about the whole thing is the fact that Universities and Hospitals are considered tax exempt. A lot of them pay a "voluntary" property tax every year just to make nice, but it's no where near what a regular business would be paying. It's long past time for them to stop being treated as a non-profit charity. They aren't.

grads beavering away in low-profile professions aren't on your radar screen. The obnoxious and entitled ones make themselves all too visible, but you're tarring an enormous number of people who don't deserve it because of them.

Not because I learned a lot about economics, that class was a bit of a joke. But because I learned a lot about the politics of my professor and I saw how quickly all the wannabe business majors in the class lapped it up.

The most ironic thing about it is that all the engineers in the room would routinely get A's, maybe a B on a bad day. And the business majors in the room would cheat their way to a C. Yes, I'm generalizing a bit. But not much. And these are some of the "best and brightest" on wall street who are now taking home outrageous salaries.

a business degree and I know why businesses are in such bad shape. There were so many people in my class that we such slackers it's not funny. At least where I went they TRIED to teach ethics and the majority did end up okay but the ones that made it big are probably the worst ones sad to say.

even 30 years ago when i was there. the Business majors were the biggest partiers, etc, class skippers, etc. At the time I didn't even have a clear idea of what 'business' was and it seemed appropriate to me that they were the extrovert types training for a life of deal making at 3-martini lunches like I saw on TV.

but the state of Illinois was not even then without its certification procedures for entry to practice. And, that was a while back and several things have happened since that time. However, Clifford Winston seems to cling to that good old idea of self-study for entry to the profession and, of course, no regulations. HIs discussion is timely what with Halloween and all, since he is channeling the ghost of Milton Friedman. He does, inadvertently, make a good case for licensure for economists and certification for Fellows at Brookings.

exact date) Oregon allowed people to take the bar exam without attending law school. Applicants "read the law" with a practicing attorney and, when ready, took the bar exam. I believe some states, Washington comes to mind, still allow this practice.

given a try, and as noted here, there are exceptions to the general track for admittance to the profession--"reading for the bar" in a few states, one or two years of law school and then an "apprenticeship" or reading, and, in Wisconsin, for example, exception from the bar examination if a graduate of one of the two law schools in the state (Marquette and U of Wisconsin).

However, Clifford Winston argues for the elimination of what he terms and, in the process, contaminates his position, barriers--formal education and the legal licensing system. Winston sees his idea in economic terms--the credentialing system is to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms not lawyer owned (which is a different kettle of fish).

He seems to dismiss the value of structured and quality education, professional or peer determinations for standards and other eligibility requirements to practice. And, with definitiveness, Winston rejects the notion of the credentialing systems serving assurances of quality or the public good.

It is well to be leery, these days, of economists cranking up old and regressive ideas in the name of economies. We see this in other professions as well--and, should we, once again, desire to try this in medicine to achieve "savings" and promote competition among the "purchasers of health care" --beware. A comparison by Mr. Magoo of pre-Abraham Flexner medicine and the present day should end the discussion.

'Must admit that when I saw it earlier today, the question posed at NYT raised these questions for me: Should doctors be required to pass medical exams? Should engineers who build bridges have to pass an engineering certification process?

Obviously, professions--lawyers, doctors, engineers & others--have discovered how to control access. And, obviously, a part of it has to do with admission to the club or fraternity. Yet, goofball me likes to see some sort of certification in instances where I turn part of myself over to someone else. Although A. Lincoln (& so many others of more than able ability in the 19th century) practiced law after being self-taught, the where-we-are-today does raise questions about knowledge & competence in a legal reality grown much more complex.

Yet, the question is a good one. And, to the extent that open discussion reins in the apparent elitist aspects, all the better. But, I'll tell ya...knowing about the background of an attorney & any professional can make a difference. Peer processes, for now, are a significant aide. (In another professional area--namely, dentisty--the check came in handy. Because, by now, a number of the old fillings & crowns needed work and/or new crowns etc., it really was nice to trust the work of my new dentist. The reality was worth it. A pox on the old non-checked dentist; kudos to my favorite new one!)

Wow! Nothing an all or nothing approach. In any case, this does not appear to be regulation, but the consequences bad mouthing and thinly veiled threats of increased taxes on the purchasers of those jets.